The Truth In Ink
by Teeny Tiny Twilight
Summary: Before Breaking Dawn takes place. Just a little one shot on...body art.


**The Truth in Ink**

**Teeny Tiny Twilight**

_Edward_

Jasper was staring at the chequered board with figurative sweat starting on his brow. The tenor of his thoughts reflected his expression as he worried the scar on his lower lip.

_I know he knows he's going to win, I just can't see _how_._

I smiled to myself as I moved a pawn on the chess board. Jasper caught his breath, watching for the move of my secret plan that was going to bring his king down, not seeing the beauty of emotional manipulation.

After seeing that the simple move had done nothing more to him then charge his already suspicious mind with paranoia, he gave me a dark look with his almost black eyes. He would have to go hunting soon, preferably before Monday morning.

"This is why I don't play with you anymore." He muttered, his eyes flickering over the board as he tried _again_ to see the plan of my attack on his petty silver figurines. He wasn't even thinking about his own strategy anymore.

Alice, who was sitting behind him rolled her eyes at me and danced over to stand beside him. She pointed out my obvious plan of attack that he had missed while looking for the less noticeable ones.

I let defeat wash over me and Jasper grinned hugely, stopping my attack, then moved his hand back in a slight move to lightly touch Alice's fingers with his own for just a short moment. The slight touch lit Alice's thoughts on fire, a brilliant light that blinded me inside my own head. I couldn't help the smile that pulled my lips up as I watched them both.

Jasper's mixture of love and triumph was so palpable that Emmett, sitting on the couch in the living room, leaned over for no reason to kiss Rosalie on the mouth.

Groaning, I rubbed my eyes as their kiss—and their thoughts—turned into anything but chaste. Alice laughed at my martyred expression. "Get a room you two."

"Come on Emmett." Rosalie purred, while her thoughts were sharp with her sarcasm and directed at me as she pulled a grinning Emmett up the stairs, _we wouldn't want to corrupt poor Edward's innocence._

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at her, and then concentrated on the board again and launched my back up attack. This strategy wasn't nearly as fun as it ended the game and Jasper's paranoia so much sooner. "Checkmate." I said grinning while I let him taste my victory.

Jasper looked at the board, his eyebrows coming together under a scar above his brow. "How didn't I see that?" he muttered as he contemplated the chequered board .

Finally he sighed and sat up, the lost game far from forgotten but he pretended it was to concentrate on me. "Is there any reason why you're flaunting you talents over me instead of spending your time with Bella?" he wondered casually.

I bit back my own sigh. I had hoped the game would have been distraction enough to sidestep this conversation. "We had a bit of an argument. I offended her by accident."

Alice asked the same silent question as Jasper, and I answered them both. "We somehow got on the topic of…body art."

Alice laughed, her eyes dancing with humour. "And you told her that you didn't want her to get any? Edward, it's the twenty first century, and though Bella might not always _act _like it, she is a teenager and she'll think about things like that."

_Piercing or tattoo?_, Jasper asked, though he had an idea of the answer already from my instant reaction.

I sighed, and confirmed his thoughts. "Piercing. She was joking about it at first. I honestly didn't think she would be interested in it. Bella _hates_ needles and anything else that has to go into her skin." I shook my head again at her stubborn expression as it flashed into my thoughts again. "I told her flat out 'no'. I should know by now how well _that_ works."

Telling Bella that she couldn't do something was like taunting her. It seems when ever I made a conscious effort to stop her from doing something, she always found a way to get around me.

It didn't matter that I was a thousand times stronger then her, a million times faster. The fact that the chemical processes in my mind were stimulated and happened more quickly then hers was just as irrelevant. It…_scared_ me sometimes. If she was so absolutely unstoppable as a human, what kind of devastation would she bring to the vampire world? No doubt she would shake the Voltury off their feet at the very least.

Alice nodded seriously at me in agreement. "So…what happened?"

When I raised my eyebrow at her she crossed her arms defensively over her chest. "Don't give me that look. I actually spend some of my time doing something other then worrying about her."

I chuckled, "I don't _always _worry about her. Sometimes I just think about her."

"Contemplating the inner workings of her mind?" Jasper asked in a quiet tone, looking at the board instead of me as he cleaned the pieces up from our game quickly, I saw the edges of a smile that he was trying to hide from me pulling up his ruined cheek.

Everyone thought that it was funny. The teasing never stopped on my obsession. Not just with her perfectly, maddeningly, enigmatic mind, but also with _her._ No matter how many times I tried to defend mine and Bella's honour to them, the teasing on my nightly visits to her never ceases either.

I sighed, "Yes." Admittedly, I usually picked apart her actions in an attempt to see what thoughts had lead to them. A certain expression coupled with a certain action had to have some sort of formula in her mind to create a single thought that could be riddled out if I just _figured it out_. That didn't seem likely.

Alice let out a sharp breath fractiously. I grinned, for someone who knew how the future was going to unfold, her impatience was endless for it to unfold already. "She argued with me of course, and then she left to get a piercing."

Alice and Jasper stared at me for a long moment. Finally Jasper spoke. "You don't seem that upset about it."

I shrugged, "Naturally, I don't enjoy quarrelling with her, and I don't believe Bella will actually _pierce_ herself. As I said, she absolutely despises needles."

Jasper smiled again, "She is an odd one, isn't she?" he laughed quietly.

I pursed my lips. "I don't think vampires are ones to talk about normalcy."

The phone rang in the same moment that Alice was suddenly preoccupied with translating the bohemian rhapsody into Russian, and then Greek.

I narrowed my eyes at her innocent face suspiciously as I picked up the phone. "Hello?" I asked wearily, not taking my eyes off Alice, swinging her legs over the side of the couch as she continued her translations, moving on to Latin.

"Hey Edward," A soft voice murmured guiltily into the receiver. Voice recognition was instant, but before I could greet her in return she was speaking again. "Sorry for arguing with you about a stupid piercing." She mumbled.

I smiled into the receiver. "Me too Bella. It was silly of me to become so worked up about something that's as easily reversible as a _piercing_." As I chuckled, I expected her to laugh with me.

"I actually wanted to talk to you about that." She mumbled lowly into the receiver after a humourless silence on her end.

My breath caught in my throat. It took me a moment for my body's discomfort at the sensory loss to reach through the haze of panic in my mind. Had she pierced her skin? Made a direct path from her delectable blood to the air? It would be like she would be walking around with an open wound for two weeks before her skin healed enough to make a thicker barrier that would lessen the scent of her blood.

My throat combusted into flames just thinking about it.

"Ah," I groaned quietly into the receiver. "I'll…be right over."

Jasper was looking at Alice with wide anxious eyes though he didn't ask what she was so preoccupied with. I knew that once I was out of her hearing range she would tell him. She was concentrating very hard on the exact angle of her legs and comparing the degree to that of similar shapes she had seen in the frames of buildings and other art pieces.

Jasper turned his dark eyes on me, and I knew that I wouldn't let Bella anywhere near this house or Jasper until she was absolutely healed. There could be no lingering scent of her flowing blood on her person.

Other unnerving thoughts made their way into my easily darkened mind as I climbed into my car. What if—even after she had healed—she caught her new piercing on something and it ripped her skin around a vampire? Or worse, what if she developed an infection? A horrible disease from an ill sterilized tool that would force my hand to have her changed before the wedding?

Where armies had fallen to their knees, a single shard of brightly coloured metal would kill Bella.

I slowed down as I closed the distance to Bella's house. The car nearly crawled into her driveway as I mentally prepared myself for what awaited me.

I took a deep breath of slightly tainted air where her scent continued to linger, clinging fiercely to the leather seats before stepping out of the car.

I walked through the rain instead of jogging lightly as I might have on a regular day. Humans didn't usually like to linger in the rain too long…

I tapped lightly on the door. A deep breath was pulled into someone's lungs behind the door, and the most significant sound in the world became irregular, Bella's heart speeding up in her nervousness.

The door opened and my eyes instantly were searching her face for any new forein object. I didn't see anything new that hadn't been there just a few hours ago.

Bella took an awkward step to the side to let me in. There was a line between her brows and she worried her lip. Just as my eyes had been searching her face, her warm opaque eyes searched my own.

I felt an unwarranted flood of selfish relief to find that her lips were still the same as I had left them, I could still kiss her. I could detect the scent of an opening in her skin; I just couldn't find it on her face, where I had expected to find it.

I smiled at her, and tucked her hair behind her ear, trying to make the gesture look casual as I examined her ears for any jewellery that hadn't been there before.

Nothing.

I frowned, perplexed. Where _was _it?

I smiled gently at her as my hand came to shape itself, on its own resolve, around her face. Electricity buzzed through my hand and sank into my bones. It always seemed, when I touched her, that Bella was more apart of me then even my own skin. She was my bones, my blood, and my pulse. She was the good in me, bringing out a light that I hadn't known resided inside me until she had coaxed it out with her own brilliant radiance.

_Concentrate_. I mentally shook my head and regained focus on what I was supposed to be here for. It was so _hard_ though when Bella's warm cheek leaned into the palm of my hand, just a soft sigh escaping her beautiful full lips…

_Concentrate._

"You wanted to speak to me about something?" I murmured as her hair slipped out from behind her ear and caressed my hand briefly before falling back into its regular arrangement, framing her face as the sky framed the moon.

Bella's eyes closed slowly, and she let out another sigh, almost a whimper of reluctance. Then slowly her eyes opened again and she stepped out of my reach. "Yes." She mumbled and started towards the livingroom.

I shadowed her, and when she sat down on the large couch in the livingroom, smelling more like Charlie then Bella, I took a seat beside her.

She didn't speak at first, worrying her lip again and twining and untwining her fingers on her lap. She watched her hands instead of me, her brow coming together again as she thought of something. Slowly driving me insane with the thoughts I couldn't touch.

I noticed finally, that she was seated differently. She didn't lean so far over as she usually did while she worried and secreted her thoughts from my curious mind.

In a flash of insight, I knew where the piercing was.

I took the edge of her shirt and pulled it up to reveal a small sliver of her ivory skin. She gasped in shock at my imprudence.

It was for no reason though, her bellybutton was perfect.

Adorable too.

She straightened up in shock, and the skin there tightened, making her bellybutton turn from adorably innocent looking to almost…sexy.

I cleared my throat and let her shirt drop down. "Sorry." I murmured, embarrassed. I realized the more practical course of action would have been to just _ask_ her.

"Find anything you like?" she asked me, her eyes wide with shock.

Yes.

"Sorry," I apologized again, "I'm looking for your piercing. I'm not having any luck with finding it though?" It was a question though it had started out as a simple remark. I chuckled lowly, looking down.

Her lips formed a small 'o' and then she grimaced. "I didn't get one. I chickened out at the last moment." She blushed at her admission and I looked up quickly to catch the blood flooding her cheeks, warming the air around her.

"But you said…" I trailed off, trying to dissect her words and her actions again as I always did, to find what she had really meant. If not that she had decorated her skin with a shard of metal, then what?

Bella sucked in a deep breath, looking like she was pulling it all the way down to her toes before she let it out and stood up. I went to stand with her, an ingrained courtesy to see a lady out. She shook her head though, and I sat back down, watching her intently.

With one more deep breath, she stood in front of me and turned around, leaving her back to me. Confusion and curiosity burned through me as I watched her pull the bottom of her long shirt up just over the top of her jeans.

I was about to ask her what she was trying to show me before I saw it. Thin black lines, looking like the top of an elegant script. It looked familiar.

I touched the lip of her jeans, moving them down slightly so I could see what she had tattooed onto her self.

_Edward's consort _

I blinked, surprised and touched the skin there, tracing the familiar script. It was _my_ writing.

At my silence Bella laughed nervously and let her shirt drop. I caught it before it veiled the words from me.

"I hope you don't mind. I used one of the letters you wrote to me and traced the words so it looked more like your writing."

"Consort?" I wondered.

Bella laughed again and went to step out of my hands. I took a firmer grip on her waist with one hand while I continued to look at the words. "It was going to say Edward's…wife." She managed to choke the word out for my sake, "But I chickened out again."

"Oh." The disappointment that it didn't say _wife_ was short, not even lasting a second before I started to turn the word that was now written on her skin around in my head.

Consort, I knew had many meanings that stretched farther then just companion. It meant harmony, to agree or harmonize with someone.

I was starting to realize that maybe this word, which I might have never thought would surpass a strictly marital explanative was better suited to what Bella meant to me then before.

She _was_ my harmony. Two different pieces coming together to make something better, more dynamic then it was alone. Since I had met her, I was more fun to be around. Happier as Emmett thought, though he would take that back each and every time we went hunting and all I wanted to do was go home.

She made it so I could complement my family now instead of just being a disconsolate extra in a company full of perfectly happy couples. They didn't need to feel guilty now when they showed their affection to each other in front of me.

Unless it was Emmett and Rose.

"Can you please give me something longer then just one word or are you going to keep grunting at me?" she asked in an irritated tone, though I heard the quiver of nerves.

My lips quirked up, though she couldn't see since I had kept her turned away from me so I could see her tattoo.

"I made sure everything was properly cleaned and sterilized before they did anything." Her voice had turned pleading at my silence.

I finally spoke as she wished me too. Or at least spoke something longer then just a single word. "I didn't think you liked needles."

I felt Bella's body shiver, "Why do you think it's on my back? Where I wouldn't see him doing it?"

I chuckled, then pulled her down so she sat on my lap. "I like it. More then I ever thought I would like a tattoo." I shook my head. Who would have thought that Edward Cullen, the proper gentleman raised in the twentieth century and turned into a vampire would fall in love with a human who rode motorcycles and inked her skin?

Surely not me.

I let my nose glide over her warm neck, inhaling the marvellously stunning fires that scorched my throat. "Did it hurt very much?" I wondered quietly, kissing the juncture between her shoulder and the arch of her graceful throat.

Bella shook her head, her breath coming faster as her heart sprinted through her chest. "Probably, but I didn't feel much. I was actually more worried about your reaction."

I laughed, and then peeked at the words that were painted onto her, never to leave her until the venom of the change burned it from her skin.

"My reaction." I whispered as I caressed the truth in ink lightly with my finger tips, "Is that I love you."

Bella sighed, leaning back contently into me. "Now about that sky diving trip Renee wants to take me on…"

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**A/N: ^_^ Thanks so much for all the reviews that I'm _still_ getting from Friend Boy. ^_^ makes me super happy. Enough that I might just take off and fly all around the world to give you all a great big kiss. **

**The reason for this author's note (other then bragging) Is i'm thinking of a new story that's all from a vampire Edward's point of veiw. Listen now: I WANT FLAMES. If you want to nit pick on his character, now is the time to do it. Of course if you would like to add a little compliment at the end of that too....well i wouldn't mind ;)**

Teeny


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